One By One By One

The nonfiction stunner of the year.

—William Safire, The New York Times

This is a moving, troubling, powerful book which will evoke shame, compassion, anger and admiration. This is a book that must be read.

—Bernard Lewis, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University; Director of the Annenberg Research Institute

Abstraction is memory’s most ardent enemy. It kills because it encourages distance and often indifference. We must remind ourselves that the Holocaust was not six million. It was one, plus one, plus one...

—Judith Miller, One, by One, by One

One, by One, by One by Judith Miller of The New York Times is brilliant reporting. Beginning with the conviction that we become what we choose to remember, Miller travels to six nations (West Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands, the USSR, and the U.S.) whose modern identities have been affected by the specter of the Holocaust, the world’s worst genocide In each country, Miller explores the ways people have consciously and unconsciously shaped their memories of this almost unspeakable tragedy, sometimes revising history to rationalize their past actions; sometimes attempting to distance themselves from painful truth; sometimes trying only to forget.

Reporting from a survivor reunion in a small West German town, the Barbie trial in France, the Waldheim controversy in Austria, and many other important sites, Miller sifts through the forgotten evidence, correcting false impressions, explaining the uses—both personal and political—of memory. Measuring the distance between history and the myths we have made, she explains how nations and individuals have blurred the specificity of the Holocaust, reducing its importance by comparing it to other mass killings. She reminds us that the nation which now identifies itself as Hitler’s first victim was actually the first Nazi ally. She reveals the vulgarization of memory in high-tech Hollywood memorials. She shows how official records have been purposely distorted, how victims have been blamed, how lessons have been lost.

At the same time, Miller searches for ways in which the truth about the Holocaust can be transmitted intact to future generations. In video archives where the testimonies of survivors are recorded for posterity, in committee meetings where battles rage over the proper methods of commemoration, she examines the ways each nation is attempting to face the legacy of the Holocaust. Though her conclusions are troubling, the words of the victims are haunting and unforgettable

I wanted to show them I had survived, one survivor says during her first visit to Germany since the war. I came to show the Germans, but I guess I needed to prove it to myself as well.

One, by One, by One is about the necessity—for all of us—of such returns. Judith Miller has written a landmark book about the Holocaust and the nature and purpose and uses of history. Finally, One, by One, by One is about the need to assimilate the truth of experience in order to mourn, learn, understand, and live.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

In 1977, Judith Miller joined The New York Times. Since then she has reported extensively from Paris, the Middle East where she served as Cairo bureau chief, and Washington where she served as Deputy Bureau Chief. Currently Deputy Media Editor, Judith Miller lives in Manhattan.

Jacket design by Koppel & Scher

Jacket photograph by F.P.G. International

Author photograph copyright © 1989 by Sigrid Estrada

Copyright © 1990 Simon & Schuster Inc.

Judith Miller

SIMON AND SCHUSTER

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Copyright © 1990 by Judith Miller

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Miller, Judith, date.

One, by one, by one: facing the Holocaust/Judith Miller.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Public opinion. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Historiography. I. Title.

D804.3.M55          1990

940.53’18—dc20

90-30091

CIP

ISBN 0-671-64472-6

ISBN-13: 978-1-4516-8463-6 (ebook)

To my parents and for Masha

Contents

PREFACE

GERMANY

AUSTRIA

THE NETHERLANDS

FRANCE

THE SOVIET UNION

THE UNITED STATES

CONCLUSIONS

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

Preface

This book is not about the Holocaust but about how it is remembered.

It is about memories of an event so horrible that scholars disagree to this day about what it should be called. The term Holocaust—a Greek word that originally meant a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire—is obviously a misnomer. The Nazi genocide was not an offering to God; nor were the Jews and Gypsies and others who were slaughtered willing victims. The word Holocaust, rather, is a palatable way of alluding to man’s descent into almost indescribable cruelty, not during ancient times but in this century. For sometimes, words fail us. The term genocide or massacre does not convey the enormity of what happened. So for want of a more accurate term, the word Holocaust has come to symbolize the evils that were perpetrated by the Germans and their accomplices. Today, even uttering the word makes people deeply uncomfortable.

This book is about that discomfort, about the struggle within each of us between the very human desire to repress memories of that era and the need not to forget it. I have tried to explore the way different people have tried to distort, to justify, to erase memories of the Holocaust, and how some have tried to use them to rationalize the past.

This book is also about the obligations of memory, about what we owe those who survived and those who did not. Survivors, Jews especially, want us all to remember the Holocaust and to pass the memories on to all our heirs. But how can this be done most effectively and honestly? If the Holocaust was unique, as I believe it was, how can it be compared to other catastrophes? If it may not be compared, how is it relevant?

I asked these questions in six countries. All, except the Soviet Union, are democracies today. All share European roots and heritage.

Germany, of course. Though the Germans do not use the word Holocaust (they prefer Final Solution and other ambiguous terms devised by the Nazis), the event was a German inspiration. Young Germans today know this; despite attempts at evasion, many are deeply ashamed of the past. The name of the town of Dachau was not changed after the concentration camp nearby was destroyed, but pregnant women frequently go to hospitals in neighboring towns so that their children’s birth certificates will not bear its name.

The ways in which the Holocaust has been remembered and taught are very different in the two parts of Germany. I concentrated on the Federal Republic, because, unlike East Germany under its Communist domination, it has not argued that the Holocaust was something perpetrated by the other Germany.

Austria, too. The Austrians elected as their president Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi soldier who declared that he had only done his duty in serving with the Waffen SS during the war. Why do they call themselves Hitler’s first victims when they were his first enthusiastic allies?

The Netherlands. Holland is the home of Anne Frank, the Holocaust’s most famous victim. Its citizens are among those most frequently honored by Israel. Few countries enjoy such a sterling reputation; few have so high an opinion of themselves and their wartime conduct. And rarely is the gap between perception and history so glaring.

France, the post-revolutionary home of liberty, equality, and fraternity, had a well established Jewish community. Under German occupation, it betrayed many of its Jewish citizens with little prodding or regret. Even so, seventy-five percent of French Jews were saved, or some would say, saved themselves. The French, absorbed by their civilization, are deeply troubled by this chapter.

The Soviet Union lost the greatest number of people during the war. By the war’s end, only 20 percent of men born in 1923 were alive. But this nation that lost so much has been unable and unwilling to recognize that its Jews suffered disproportionately because of their Jewishness. The historical record has been officially distorted.

Finally, the United States. The majority of Jewish survivors came here. They found a democratic, tolerant culture in which they and their children prospered. Americans are far removed, morally and geographically, from the scene of the genocide. While this distance has enabled many American Jews to confront the Holocaust, for many it has become an obsession. It is they who have been most enraged by the efforts to erase or alter the memory of what happened. They have led the campaign against President Reagan’s commemoration at the cemetery at Bitburg, against Kurt Waldheim, and against the presence of Polish Carmelite nuns at Auschwitz. They have a practical stake in keeping memory of the Holocaust alive, as a way of maintaining American support for Israel, and as a talisman in fighting discrimination against themselves and other minorities.

As I traveled in Europe and America, I heard different people describe different Holocausts. There did not seem to be a collective memory in any country I visited. The war bitterly divided people already split by class, religion, and political ideology. Jews, however, do seem to have something resembling collective memory. For them, memory is almost religion. As Saul Friedlander, the Israeli Holocaust historian, has noted, Judaism is partly the retelling of a story; remembrance is the essential component of Jewish tradition.

In each of the six countries, I found many signs of Holocaust revisionism. Facts have been recrafted, through false comparisons and analyses of peripheral rather than the core events of the Holocaust. There is what the Germans call Schlusstrich, (the creation of historical dividing lines) and inversion of guilt, blaming the victims.

Only a tiny group of malevolent cranks contends that the Holocaust did not take place, but the more subtle forms of revisionism are evident in battles over how history should be taught, in jokes, in literature, and in the popular culture, in television and films.

I am a journalist. So I tried to let people describe the Holocaust they remembered in their own words. What I have written are their memories of the past. Some of what they said was true, some distorted. But I wanted the clashes of memory to emerge through the voices of those who endured those years and those struggling today to understand or rationalize the inexplicable.

Through their stories, I have come to a few conclusions about the prospects for coming to grips with the Holocaust. Some of them are troubling.

Judith Miller

New York

January 1990

Germany

A tiny gap in history was closed in May 1987 when Henny Oppenheimer returned to Fulda, a picture-postcard West German town near the border with East Germany.

Mrs. Oppenheimer, née Henny Lump, one of eleven Lump children, was born in 1918. She had fled Nazi terror in 1939 for safety in England, and later in America. At age sixty-eight, she had come back, along with nineteen members of her own family and some three hundred former residents, at the invitation and expense of the town council, for a reunion of Holocaust survivors from Fulda.

In 1933, when the town had 30,000 residents, Jews had numbered 1,200. In 1987, the population was 60,000; there were 36 Jews.

The day before the ceremony, the Jewish guests, as the former residents were called, visited the Jewish cemetery in Edelzell, a tranquil suburb where townsfolk picnic on sunny spring weekends, like the one that May.

As Henny stood at the foot of her mother’s gray tombstone, badly eroded by fifty years of harsh German winters and other seasons of neglect, she studied a map of the cemetery that her hosts had distributed. Five years ago, the town council had funded a project to identify the individuals buried in the Jewish cemetery to preserve some memory of the Jewish community that had once flourished here.¹

Henny noticed that the grave on the map immediately beyond her mother’s was designated, as were several others, unidentified.

But I know who is buried here, she murmured to her daughter. I know who is here, she repeated, her tiny frame trembling with recognition, her voice rising in pitch and volume. It’s Hugo, she exclaimed. Hugo Plaut!

She went to find a Fulda official with whom she could share her discovery. Hugo Plaut’s grave was not the one marked on the cemetery map, she said. A mistake had been made.

Hugo, she told the tall young city official, had been her boyfriend, one of many before the war. Henny, by many accounts, was the most beautiful of the Lump children, indeed, one of the most alluring young women in all of Fulda. Hugo had been arrested before she had fled Germany. He had been sent to a camp somewhere. They had lost contact.

In England friends had told her that Hugo had died in the camp in 1939 on the day he was to have been released—how they did not know. His body had been returned to Fulda, a rarity in those times. Because Hugo had always adored Henny’s mother, they recounted, he had been buried next to her grave.

The young official listened intently and wrote down in a notebook the letters P-L-A-U-T, while Henny talked on, unconsciously tugging on his sleeve in her excitement. As details of Hugo’s brief life poured forth, a young man seemed to take shape: a slender, love-smitten young Jew, with dark hair, black eyes, a somewhat shy youth who lived near her house, who was gifted in sports but loved poetry, who had a musical voice.

He is buried right there, Henny insisted, pointing to the unmarked grave just beyond her mother’s.

Now, there is one less misplaced Jewish grave. Thanks to her memory, one more member of Fulda’s once-thriving Jewish community has regained an identity of sorts, if only in death.

This was but one of the many gaps in Fulda’s past that were filled last spring as a result of the town’s largest reunion of Holocaust survivors.

In the past few years, there have been many such reunions in West Germany. Holocaust exhibitions and commemorations have become so common that they are virtually a cottage industry in the Bundesrepublic.²

The phenomenon has been most pronounced in Germany. Though Poland, Austria, Belgium, and France lost thousands of Jews in the Holocaust, none has invited survivors back in such large numbers for commemoration ceremonies. Why the belated German interest in renewing contacts with the Jews who were forced to flee their native land? Why now?

Because we sense their loss more deeply with every passing year, said Wolfgang Hamberger, Fulda’s Lord Mayor, a Christian Democrat in his fifties, a staunch Catholic, who began trying to reestablish contacts with Fulda’s Jews more than eighteen years ago.³

The rash of commemorations and Holocaust reunions in Germany suggests that for survivors, too, the time for remembrance has finally come.

I thought of coming back before now, but my heart didn’t allow it, said Lisa Wallach Levy, who returned to Fulda last May for the first time in forty-five years. I lost a sister here, my parents, my cousins, a beautiful family. Both my children had come to visit; they encouraged me to come back. But I couldn’t do it before now.

Hermann G., a participant who asked not to be identified, said he had returned because I wanted to see Fulda just once more before I die. Now in his late seventies, he knew, he said matter-of-factly, The end is near. So I wanted to visit my parents’ graves, the school I attended. I wanted to see even one familiar face from my childhood. Would they know what had happened to me all these years? And I wanted my grandson to see it, to know what happened here.

I needed to show them that I had survived, declared Johanna Lump Weiss, another survivor. I came to show the Germans, but I guess I needed to prove it to myself as well.

Many students of the Holocaust believe that reunions like the one in Fulda could not have taken place much before now. Only a generation more distant from the immediate catastrophe could dare to approach it, observed Michael Berenbaum, the project director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. As the story of Lot’s wife illustrates, a person cannot afford to look back while fleeing.⁴

The commemorations have been occurring not one but two generations after the war. This, according to Berenbaum, was also predictable. Many Holocaust survivors were psychologically unable to discuss their experiences with their own children; it was their grandchildren’s curiosity that sparked a response, a resurgence of memory.

The commemoration in Fulda, an extraordinary gathering, underscored the benefits, as well as the limitations of such events. It provided clues to the motivations of Germans who have sponsored such events, and of the Jews who have chosen to return and participate in them. It showed why commemorations like this one can, under certain circumstances, for certain people, be an effective transmitter of memory, a means of overcoming man’s natural instinct to forget or suppress. Commemoration can also be an excellent mechanism for reconciliation—with one’s past, with one’s former enemies, between children of former enemies.

But like war-crimes trials or political tests of strength, commemorations are complex phenomena. And the gathering in Fulda was emotionally wrenching for most of the survivors, and, often, even more so for their children and grandchildren. For some, it proved only how elusive the goal of reconciliation with oneself and one’s former enemies remains.

Fulda is something of an anomaly. Founded in 744 by the Benedictine monk Sturmius, better known as St. Boniface, the city is a Catholic enclave in the predominantly Protestant region of Hesse. More than 70 percent of its inhabitants are Roman Catholics. St. Boniface is buried in St. Michael’s Cathedral, and German Catholic bishops have been convening their annual conferences here since 1867. In 1949, Fulda also became the seat of the presidial office of the German Protestant church organization.

It is a fiercely conservative town, black as the night, say its inhabitants, a reference to the dominance of Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union party, whose color is black and which in 1986 controlled an absolute majority on the fifty-seven-member town council.

A glossy tourist brochure distributed to the Holocaust survivors contains a brief historical information section that omits any reference to the years of National Socialism. Between 1927, when Fulda became an independent municipality and 1944, which, according to the brochure, was marked by a heavy air raid on the city, there are no entries.

As in many German towns, its officials appear somewhat defensive about its wartime record. Anton Schmidt, editor of the local newspaper, Fuldaer Zeitung, and president of the city’s chamber of commerce, argued that because of the residents’ deeply ingrained Catholicism, National Socialism in the 1930s had far less appeal in Fulda than in other parts of Hesse and in Germany as a whole.⁵

In 1933, for example, Fulda’s last prewar democratic town council election, the conservative, heavily Catholic Zentrum party, the historical predecessor of the Christian Democrats, won 51.6 percent of the votes cast; the National Socialists won 26.9 percent, or eight of the thirty-two seats on the town council.⁶

Having come to power at the national level, however, the National Socialists were relentless in putting in motion the machinery of uniformity and, in Fulda, too, they hindered the existence of our elected town council, recounted Paul Gwosdz, Fulda’s chief town councillor. After several elected representatives had been forbidden to take up their council seats, the majority—the center—resigned their seats under pressure by the National Socialists. The places were filled on October 13, 1933, by National Socialists, the death certificate of democracy in Fulda, he said.

What officials here did not mention is that while a German Catholic bishops conference would later condemn the Nazis, it was here in Fulda in 1938 that the bishops overwhelmingly approved a resolution congratulating Hitler for his invasion of Czechoslovakia and the liberation of the oppressed Germanic peoples of the Sudetenland.⁷

Nor did town officials volunteer that no Jewish adult was hidden successfully during the war in this God-fearing town.

There was a priest, Heinrich Huhn, my teacher in school, recalled Herbert Naftali Sonn, a Fulda-born historian who has written two books on the town. The priest saved two Jewish children by hiding them in his home. He sent them to America after the war, said Professor Sonn, who now lives in Israel.

But where were all the other Catholics? Yes, it was a religious town, but it was a silent crowd.⁸

Mayor Hamberger did not disagree. Although there had been some courageous examples of self-sacrificing assistance to the community’s Jews, he said, there was also a lack of steadfastness, loyalty and prayer, a lack of faith and love. The majority had simply surrendered to the suggestion of authority of the totalitarian Nazi state.⁹

The ceremony in Fulda in May 1987 was among the largest of its kind ever held in Germany. The guests included 130 Jews from Israel, 97 from the United States, and 70 from more than 20 other countries.

We invited everybody because we did not want to select guests, Mayor Hamberger explained in May 1987 at his office in the stately Stadtschloss, the baroque town hall. The word itself—‘select’—has terrible connotations for us, he said. "It’s a bad word, a bad concept. So we decided to invite everybody.

Much to our surprise, he continued, nearly everybody came.

Despite the fact that Fulda had expected one hundred guests and received more than three hundred, including spouses and children, the week-long commemoration ran smoothly, like clockwork, one survivor observed, an ironic nod to legendary German efficiency. Buses shuttled participants back and forth to hotels and events with near-perfect punctuality; hotel rooms and restaurants offered crisp, efficient service to the city’s guests; the college students hired by the town’s tourist office to help out were models of decorum and spared no effort to ensure that the former residents’ many needs and conflicting requests were satisfied; townspeople were warm, helpful, and hospitable. The organization was, in brief, impeccable.

The German hosts paid special attention to the guests’ sensitivities. City officials and residents seemed to understand that their every word, every gesture, in a restaurant or shop or hotel, would be scrutinized. For many of the guests, any German would be judged automatically guilty until proven innocent—guilty of anti-Semitism, intolerance, aloofness, and insensitivity. So Lufthansa, the German national airline, which had flown participants to Frankfurt from around the globe, made certain that flights with Fulda’s Jews as passengers had an ample supply of kosher food on board. The town’s largest bookstore featured a window display of Holocaust and Jewish literature in German. Security in town was tight but discreet. The Mayor had ordered that no uniforms be worn by guards who had been specially hired to provide security for public events. The Mayor and other city officials donned yarmulkes for appropriate occasions.

The most important events—and the most emotionally taxing for the Jews—were the visit to the cemetery, the dinner meeting with residents of Fulda, and the dedication of the former Jewish school, which so many in the group had attended, as Fulda’s Jewish cultural center. Thanks to the town council’s ambitious program of city and museum tours, walks, concerts, lunches, dinners, and lectures, every minute of the day was filled.¹⁰

Martin Steinberger, of London, found the reunion a little too efficient. Everything was organized to the last detail. It reminded me of the Nazi period and the deportations—how well they managed everything.

It is almost as if they didn’t want us to have too much time to think—to dwell on what happened here, mused Bert Wallace, an inventor from New York who was making his first trip back to Fulda since his family fled to the United States in 1938.

But for most the return to Fulda was a journey not only into the past but into themselves—a time to evaluate what had happened to them in this city and since. While reactions, predictably, varied sharply, most of those who participated expressed enthusiasm and described the trip, especially after they returned home, as an extremely positive experience. They said they had been unprepared for, and pleasantly surprised by, the warmth of their reception in the city they had fled."¹¹

Countless memories returned: the evil, sad, and bitter, long repressed; but also pleasant and uplifting ones, of people who had helped them, of comfort and humor, of sympathy and support.

Bert Wallace recounted how Fulda’s police chief, a good man named Berenson, had warned the Wallace family to leave their house on four or five occasions when the Nazis were conducting raids. Berenson had long since died, but Wallace was delighted to encounter his son at the reunion dinner.

Frank Feist Schuster, a physician, who had left Fulda with his parents when he was nine months old, met an elderly German woman in a neighboring town where his grandparents and an aunt are buried. She had known his relatives, she told him. During what she characterized as those bad times, her parents used to bake challah for the Friday-night Sabbath dinner; they would leave it for the Schusters under a bridge so that they could enjoy the forbidden ritual bread.

Several of the participants said that they felt more German after the trip, for better or worse. It’s very strong, this sense of German identity, said Lisa Wallach Levy.

I hadn’t spoken German for years but it all came back, said Doris Fingerhood, a member of the Lump family. I not only got to know my own family better here, I was once again steeped in Fulda’s history and culture. I love the sense of history here.

For some, this discovery of their Germanness was a bit of a shock. You can suddenly see how it could have happened, said Yaakov Hain, of Danville, Virginia, whose father came from Fulda. They don’t walk when the stoplight is red, even if there isn’t a car in sight. Stores close one minute after 2 P.M. Restaurants won’t serve you after the appointed hour. They’re so structured and regimented, to this day!

There remains a tremendous compulsion to follow orders, to do everything thoroughly, said Bert Wallace. I keep thinking: a little bit of anarchy is good for the soul.

At breakfast one morning at the Hotel Lenz, Else Baum Reiter, who had come from Fulda, and her American-born son, Ron, were discussing the visit when Mrs. Reiter began chiding a non-German guest at their table for her manners. The guest had failed to deposit the wrappers of the butter slices in the bowl in the middle of the table marked Für den Sauberen Tisch, or For a Clear Table.

My mother, said Ron, sipping his coffee, bemused, is a German Jew.

The most rewarding part of the visit for most of the participants was finding old friends and people they had known and cared about among the survivors.

Lee Stern, who was born in Fulda and now resides in New Jersey, was walking out of a restaurant when she heard someone call her name. I turned around and there was my kindergarten teacher! said Mrs. Stern. I thought she had been killed in a concentration camp, but there she was, large as life, and like me, enjoying life in the United States.

I found a school chum who had dropped out of the gymnasium in 1934 before graduating because the Nazis had doubled the fees for Jewish students, Mr. Wallace said. I thought he had died at Auschwitz, but Hermann Wiesenberg and his brother had survived five years at Buchenwald and were living in New York. Imagine my joy at finding him alive!

Nancy Campus, a psychologist whose mother was born in Fulda, said that the large numbers of visitors were critical to the success of the reunion because the event was intended to connect people with people and because the crowd provided a sense of camaraderie and support.¹²

Knowing and dealing with painful realities in isolation is too much for the human spirit to endure, Ms. Campus observed. So there was a healing that emerged from sharing and a strength in numbers.

The Lump family, in many respects, was a microcosm of the group of returnees. Their reactions mirrored the intensity and variety of what many of the participants experienced. For some of the survivors, it was their first trip back to Fulda since the war; for some of their children, it was their first visit to Germany. Several could forgive young Germans for what had happened here; others said that the trip had not changed the way they felt about Germany or older Germans. Some had resisted the trip; but one said that she had been more afraid of not going. If you don’t return, the fantasies get stronger. They overwhelm you.

Berta Salomon, Henny Lump’s older sister, said she had not wanted to come back and would not have but for the encouragement of her family. I wanted to wipe this out, she said. Her reluctance was reinforced by a previous trip here for two days in 1972 to visit her mother’s grave.

It was terrible, she recounted. All the Jewish stores had disappeared, all the people I had known. I had no contact with people in the town and didn’t particularly want any, she said. But I decided that since the whole family was going, this trip would have some meaning. We have three generations at the reunion. And I’ve seen lots of people I know. And I’m glad I came.

Nancy Campus, who is Berta’s daughter, said it was not true, as many of the participants maintained, that they had returned only because of family pressure or encouragement.

I sensed that they themselves needed to revisit their past, Ms. Campus wrote soon after the trip.¹³ They needed questions answered: "What happened to my best friend in school? Is my house still there? Who is living in it? They needed to share memories with others who understood. Some came to reconnect with Germans who had been friends or who had helped them escape, for almost every survivor I spoke with had been aided by a goy. In short, for those who came, the need to know overshadowed all the other considerations."

Berta’s positive feeling about the trip was the result of her own confrontation with the past, of the discovery of answers to many of the questions her daughter had articulated for her, and the fact that she was able to share her very mixed memories and feelings with former school friends and her family.

It was like a dam breaking. We heard stories about our family I had never heard before, said Steven Fingerhood, the grandson of Rosie Lump, Henny and Berta’s sister, who was killed at Auschwitz. The trip brought us much closer together. It was a mass catharsis.

The Lumps had been well known throughout the town because of the size of their family, large even by German standards, and because most of the Lump boys were active in sports—excellent soccer players. Like most of the Jews in Fulda, they were orthodox. Bernard, the head of the family, had been a cattle trader. His wife, Regina, the mother of eleven, had been known as a kind, gentle woman who was never too busy to help a friend. They had lived in a four-story house with a red tile roof, typical of the town, at 23 Petersberger Strasse.

The family had prospered in Fulda. Ludwig, the eldest son, was a prominent lawyer. Leopold, another son, was a pharmacist who patented a much-used drug. Berta had married Hans Salomon, who lived in Celle, four hours north of Fulda. Hans’s family had relatives in the United States, but there was an eighteen-month wait until their names were scheduled to come up on the quota list. Rather than stay in Germany, where conditions for Jews had been deteriorating rapidly, especially after Kristallnacht, the November 1938 Nazi-orchestrated pogrom against the Jews, Hans and Berta moved to Shanghai to wait.¹⁴

She remembered her attempt to persuade her mother and father to go with them. They told us that it was better to die in Germany, said Berta.

The conditions in Shanghai were horrible, she said. And many did die there. But we believed it was better than taking a chance of staying in Germany.

Until they got permission to immigrate to the United States, Hans and Berta lived off savings. Other family members were not as lucky. Ludwig, the eldest, was sent briefly to a concentration camp. He was released and fled Germany to Shanghai to join Berta and Hans. Depressed and weakened from his camp incarceration, he died of typhus in 1939.

Leopold, the pharmacist, had moved to Belgium before the Nazis took power in Germany. When the Wehrmacht invaded Belgium, he fled to France. By that time, Berta had arrived in America, and desperately tried to get Leopold the papers he needed to enter the United States. Bureaucratic snafus ensued. The American consulate in Marseilles sent Leopold’s documents back three times for what Berta called petty bureaucratic reasons.

Finally a visa to the United States was granted. But Leopold was arrested by the police en route to his boat to America. He was sent to a concentration camp somewhere in the East, she said. There he died.

A similar fate awaited Rosie Lump, Berta’s sister and Steve Fingerhood’s grandmother, who had married up in status to Leo Cohen, a wealthy Jew in Berlin. Rosie and her husband sent their two daughters to England in a special children’s transport. But they could not leave Berlin and were hidden by a Christian family in the capital. Six months before the liberation of Berlin by the Allies, they were betrayed by a Jewish informer, Steven said. Rosie and her husband both died in the camps. Steven did not know what had happened to their Christian protectors.

On a walking tour of the town, Henny was startled when she saw the convent to which she had run for help one night in 1939 when her mother was critically ill. Under Nazi law, non-Jewish doctors and nurses could not treat Jewish patients, but there was no Jewish physician available to see Regina during a particularly brutal bout of cancer-induced pain.

Henny recalled running down the cobblestone road to the massive wooden doors of the convent. She had banged on the door with her fists, sobbing. A nun, whom she remembered as Sister Theresa, had accompanied her to their home and given her mother injections to ease her pain. She had stayed with Henny and her mother through the night. In the morning, Henny touched her mother’s toes. They were ice cold, so she started making a hot-water bottle to warm them.

It’s no use, Sister Theresa said, placing her hand gently on Henny’s shoulder. Your mother is with God now.

Regina was buried at 5 A.M. in a secret Jewish ceremony at the cemetery so that the Nazis wouldn’t interfere.

At the convent some forty years later, Henny and Berta found a contemporary of the nun who had helped their mother. The sister said that the nun was a nurse named Ilona, not Theresa. She, too, was with God now, they were told.

There were a good number of gentiles here in Fulda who had helped us whom we had forgotten, said Mrs. Wallace. This trip has made us remember them, all the good people who helped.

But with the surfacing of good memories came the bad and the ambivalent. One day, for example, some of the Lumps mustered the courage to visit their former home. It had been occupied for years by a woman, now very old, whose husband had probably bought it at auction from the Nazis.

She let us enter in stages, said Doris Fingerhood, Rosie’s daughter, who had left Germany for England when she was eleven years old. "The house looked physically much as I remembered it, only much smaller. I kept thinking: where did my parents put eleven children?

"But I had remembered the